1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a mobile network, and more particularly to home agents and a method for reliable load balancing of the same on a mobile IPv6 network.
2. Description of Related Art
Mobile IPv6 refers to a new network protocol where nodes remain reachable while moving around in the IPv6 Internet. As specified in “Mobility Support in IPv6,” RFC 3775, available from the Internet Engineering Task Force, is an improved version over the existing Mobile IPv4 standard, which has served as the underlying protocol for the internet for almost 30 years. Its robustness, scalability, and limited feature set or the prior standard are being challenged by the growing need for new IP addresses by a plethora of mobile communication devices. As a result, the Mobile IPv6 protocol has been developed for supporting wireless communications where the mobile nodes may roam around the network.
One of the drawbacks of the conventional Mobile IPv6 protocol occurs when the packets are sent during a home agent reassignment request or during periods when the active home agent becomes overloaded because of the increased data traffic of the mobile nodes that are already registered. The network traffic bottleneck is the result of unbalanced dynamic distribution of load among the home agents in the home network at any given time. Furthermore, tunnels created between a large number of the mobile nodes, which includes the encapsulation and routing of the packets to the active home agent and the updating of the binding cache randomly, result in the overloading of workload of the active home agent.